Håkon Wium Lie's article, CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing on A List Apart in August 2007 may have got the (snow)ball rolling, but it seems that it was the announcement of Typekit on May 27 this year which has prompted an avalanche of interest in web fonts. Or maybe I've just woken up to the issue since then and been taking more notice. But I seem to be adding a lot of font and type-related bookmarks lately and thought it would be worth sharing some of them.
It may only be a very small amendment, but I've just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.
Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows
By John Faulds /
If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE's Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.
Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
By John Faulds /
Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a Wordpress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could've been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I've done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn't go that route on this occasion:
With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would've been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.
Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?
By John Faulds /
Which is better in links from the search engines' point of view: plain text or images with an alt attribute that says the same thing? For example, is <a href="">This is a link</a> better than <a href=""><img alt="This is a link" src=""></a>?
I have come across a few little solutions/fixes recently to various problems I've encountered when building sites with ExpressionEngine (EE) that I thought it would be worth sharing. A couple of these were tips I picked up from other posters on the EE forums and the third was one I came up with myself to solve a particular problem I had.
Animated navigation items using jQuery
By John Faulds /
Dave Shea recently published an article on A List Apart (ALA), CSS Sprites2 – It's JavaScript Time', about how to use jQuery to create the effect of animated rollovers on navigation items. The technique he outlines makes use of the same image replacement method as outlined in ALA's original Sprites article.
The problem with this method however is that it uses a large negative text-indent to remove the default text from screen, and with images turned off in the browser, you don't see anything. This has accessibility implications not only from the perspective of those with disabilities, but also for those who deliberately turn images off, i.e. people on slower connections or those using handheld devices who are trying to limit the amount of information downloaded to their phone.
File and image management plugins for TinyMCE
By John Faulds /
If you're using ExpressionEngine (EE) with a WYSIWYG editor, chances are you're using either TinyMCE or FCKEditor. I myself use TinyMCE and it seems like a lot of people prefer it to FCKEditor, but for one thing – it doesn't have good image and file management capabilties built in by default.
More useful extensions for developing with Firefox
By John Faulds /
A while ago I wrote about some of the extensions I use with Firefox which make the job of web development easier. I've since added some new ones to Firefox that I use on a fairly regular basis, so thought I should update the list.
Connecting to an external database from within a Wordpress post
By John Faulds /
For the article I wrote recently on web design galleries, I compiled a table of the galleries in a MySQL database. To be able to display the table and the associated charts and other statistics that went with it, I needed to be able to connect to this external database from within Wordpress.